It’s All One Thing #199: It Happens Every Time

Every time they get in power the Republicans
repetitively project a new constitutional crisis
Watergate, Iran-Contra, Bush/Cheney regime
Unitary Executive corporations are people you know
perpetual war national security state surveillance
state of radical industrial scale technological change
purely for the sake of private profit we’re all alone
in existential threat space looking for God when God
is not there, will never be there as the democratic
rear guard defense, the tail that attempts to wag
attack dog Arf! Arf! Arf! of Perpetual Profit-ization
the elimination of whatever regulation protects us
the installation of laws that protect their huge profits
“risk corridors” labyrinthine wormhole foundations
claw back the “competitors” into single payer monopoly
as they stomp their dirty boots on door mat demo-can’t-do-
nothings whose only excuse for existence is to be full-time
losers stuttering in the breach frozen cold-hearted
at the very moment of compassion requires some action
when Mutiny on the Bounty becomes Men Against the Sea
and Pitcairn Island endless pedaphilla hysteria projected
onto the sunny beaches washing away the Southern Sea
Paradise where Gaugin died of syphilis in Paradise, Paradise
Lost will they call a constitutional convention to grapple Central
Government into their libertarian Economic Straitjacket?

James Van Looy has been a fixture in Boston’s poetry venues since the 1970s. He is a member of Cosmic Spelunker Theater and has run poetry workshops for Boston area homeless people at Pine Street Inn and St. Francis House since 1992. Van Looy leads the Labyrinth Creative Movement Workshop, which his Labyrinth titled poems are based on. His work appears weekly in Oddball Magazine.